Below zero outside, ice on the windows, and the seed catalogs begin to drift up on the kitchen table at this time of year. We are trying more and more to chose varieties based on their history and adaptations to our region, and looking forward to saving and sharing more seeds with growers and farmers nearby. Along the way, we are finding, learning, and honoring the personal and close to home stories the seeds can hold.

Someone asked recently if we'd started planning our growing space and crops for next year. I had to smile--in some ways our crop planning is never-ending. Even in the earliest spring plantings there's the dialog of next year. As in next year, we'll order the larger pack of carrots seeds, or next year we don't need to plant nearly so many cabbage starts. It continues through the growing season, each year's garden a working draft full of editing and revision. And so we make notes: delete the "calliope mix" of carrots (beautiful multicolored carrot bunches don't outweigh the fact that they are less flavorful than the orange, and those white ones are ghostly anemic little vegetables, with a tendency to bolt and go to seed rather than making a root); add some melons started indoors; move the clover seeded under the squash to a week later in the season. The summer and the fall harvest seasons are full of notes in the margins, ideas for improving. We never really stop planning.

At this point in the season we are still processing many of those notes--both mental and recorded--about what to do next year. At the same time, we are revisioning at a larger scale as we shift from growing just for ourselves to growing for sale as well. And right in the middle of that process, the seed catalogs are starting to arrive. I have spent a few of our sub-zero mornings lately with a cup of coffee and a seed catalog (or several) in front of the full-spectrum light (the seedlings and chickens aren't the only ones who benefit from a little supplemental lighting here).

Those seed catalogs, with their color photos, illustrations, and descriptions, are quite seductive. I've always been one to fall for heirloom varietites with a good story or an interesting name. And here's where I confess to having recklessly planted four different kinds of dry corn this year. Two did spectacularly well (the Seneca Red Stalker and Mandan Bride), they all did a little bit of crossing with the sweet corn (just a few kernels here and there), but the Oaxacan Green Dent corn failed rather miserably. I have been to Oaxaca, and I know full well the climate is quite different than Montana, but....I couldn't resist the image of green corn tamales.

That's the beauty and danger of heirloom seed catalogs like the Seed Saver's Exchange: you can get caught up in the story and forget one of the key values of heirloom seeds: finding one that is right for your area. While an emphasis of the land grant universities in each state used to include development of regionally adapted seeds, much of that specific local adaptation has been lost, and many seed varieties are sold across the country with little specificity. Many are widely adapated enough to work most places, with a bit of care and protection. Some are specifically touted for a feature like maturing quickly, that can provide advatages in any short-season location, whether it's Vermont or Wyoming. But there's more to local conditions than just what USDA zone you are growing in.

I have worked on research projects examining how much local adapatation there can be in species of wild plants that have a large geographic range. I know there is a keen value in using seeds that come from plants surviving for generations in the region. And so this year, in my garden planning, I'm making a renewed effort to chose varieties with a story special to here.

So I find myself looking through the dry bean descriptions and underlining those that were originally found or defined in the nearby states, and deciding to perhaps pass up the ones from Alabama even if their flavor and colors sound delightful. I am hoping we can get back to visit someone in the Bitterroot again who fed us a wonderful soup from homegrown beans (and wishing I'd been bold enough to ask for some seeds at that lunch).

Luckily, trying to find locally adapted seeds doesn't need to mean any sort of compromise on having a plant with a good story. In fact, it can just get better. In the corn patch for example, as much as I loved the purple husks of the Seneca Red Stalker, I think I know what next year's dry corn will be: the Painted Mountain Corn whose development specifically for our cold dry region has been a work of passion of Dave Christensen. Over the summer we've spoken with more and more neighbors who grow it sucessfully here. And the garden romantic in me can pass up the temptation of the "Black Aztec" a little easier knowing that this variety has stories from indigenous corns throughout the west, but also from right here, next door.

I'm beginning to understand that the best story isn't in the 80-word description in the catalog mailed from Vermont or Maine or Oregon, but the ones you watch unfold, attach to the plant, and keep on telling. This is the variety of corn that was developed for our area's climate. But more than that, it's the corn in the final beautiful pages of our friend Cedar's first book of poetry, a poem dedicated to her husband Mark. It's the corn that was scattered in the cottonwood grove this summer as a part of their wedding ceremony, and the corn they arranged in sunset-colored mandalas and photographed last fall. It's the corn that encompasses their own story of courtship and gardens and growth, like the Delicata squash are for us.

Of course, not everyone has a household of poetic gardeners next door, but there are ways to seek out seeds developed in, grown in, or originating from your region, ready to take on some of your own story too.

An old streambank on the Antelope Springs Ranch reveals the soil profile and how deep roots can penetrate, even though layers of tough, degraded soils. Soil is the most valuable asset on this ranch, so they work to rebuild soil health.

We spent yesterday afternoon in a sterile hotel meeting hall with probably 200 other farmers and ranchers of all ages and styles brought together by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. We were greeted in the lobby by hotel staff who recognized what we must be there for and pointed down the hall with a smile "The dirt people are that way." We were attending a Soil Health Workshop, which sound dry at first but included such great presenters and insipiring information that we sometimes found ourselves engaged in almost a religious call-and-response fervor. Here are just a few of the highlights from the presentations:

Every farmer has livestock. Even if you just grow vegetables, you have livestock.

— Jon Sitka, NRCS Soil Scientist

This is the "underground herd" responsible for 90% of the functions we expect out of soil. Jon Sitka started his talk by holding up a small fist-sized aggregate (clump) of soil, and pointing out that it housed at least 7.5 billion microorganisms--a population in that handful of soil equal to the number of people on earth. These micro-livestock need careful tending, feeding, and care in order for the soil to function at its best. Just as ranchers who doesn't feed or shelter their aboveground cattle will lose profits and potential, anyone trying to grow crops from the soil will lose out if they don't properly care for that underground herd.

 We are creating our own droughts.

— Jon Sitka, NRCS Soil Scientist

By repeatedly taking too much plant material from aboveground, and not giving plants time to recover fully and regrow root systems, the water holding capacity of the soil is reduced, compounding problems from low rainfall years. Healthy soils can buffer those times of low rainfall by holding on to the water for longer.

Lotta dollars of fertilizer coming out of the back end of that cow. Now, do you want that all piled up in one place or spread out?

— Doug Peterson, NRCS Pasture Grazing Specialist and Rancher

The second presentation, from Doug Peterson, was about how to use high-intensity, short-duration grazing methods, such as "mob grazing" to manage pasture or range specifically to build soils. Local producers from Western Montana spoke to the audience about their successes and soil improvements from following these methods on parcels ranging from 30 or 40 to 300 acres, but it can apply at many scales. Noah is working with and documenting practices of ranchers who are applying these same tools and principles to restore soil over 50,000 acre spreads in Eastern Montana. We're excited to see how, with some work and creativity, we might do the same on a humble ten or so acres.

In all too familiar territory lately the writing of this post begins late at night, 10 pm on the road. We are on our way back from a long day. We are grateful it ended with a visit to a friend and fellow farmer, where we shared an improvised home-grown dinner in the tipi where she lives three seasons of the year on her farm. We spent a good long evening stoking the woodstove, laughing, and commiserating on the complications, tough decisions, and inherent uncertainties of farming. We traded the stories of how it was that each of us came to know that growing food was some important part of us, something worth the sacrifices of time, income and, often, comfort.

We have learned much of this--what we are willing to do for this goal, and how it has expanded beyond just wanting to grow food for ourselves--over this past year. We have only begun to write about it, and we know our first writings, with forbodings of the possibility of losing it all, left many of you curious or confused of exactly what the situation was. It's not been our intention to hide the process or the status--honestly, for a long time we weren't sure, ourselves, what was happening and if we would get to stay here on this place we threw ourselves into so wholly over the past year.

We kept quiet in this space partly because so much was uncertain, and in part out of wanting to respect and preserve the privacy of the process with our friend the landowner we have been working with this past year. We held out hope, struggling and stretching to find any sort of solution that would work for all of us and let us keep growing and living on this space we'd fallen in love with. Sadly, despite so much searching for solutions, the simple truth is, we can't stay here.

In some ways it's been like a tough break-up. You know, one where you know for quite some time that things aren't really going to work out, but the reality of moving on is just too much to take. We've run several laps through all the textbook stages of grief.

The reasons are complicated. Many of them echo some that are regional, national, or even global: available agriculture land is shrinking, especially near population centers. Remaining land is priced for the growth of houses rather than food. Other reasons are unique to our neighborhood and location: zoning and building restrictions that meant no feasible way to live on the property we farmed. Others are purely personal. Our vision of a farm scaled to provide some income, one that integrated animals into fruit and vegetable growing systems, simply did not fit with the landowner's vision.

We'll continue to write about our time here in this place: our progress, our learnings--both record crops and failures--even as we look out onto very uncertain horizons to search for what comes next. There are still so many stories from this space and this time, even as we search for the next stage.

It's a time to consider everything, all kinds of creative business and livelihood options, all kinds of geography. We do hope to be able to stay in this region where we have some good community and are surrounded by a landscape that inspires us. But it may not be easy to do. None of it is a simple decision though, or a light one.

People keep asking what type of farm it is we want, and what we are looking for. In some ways it's simple; in other ways it changes with the place itself. We built our goals and plans out from this space here--a diversified vegetable farm with 15-20 families from the immediate neighborhood purchasing seasonal farm shares, picking up their produce weekly on an evening sweetened by the offer of homemade pizza baked in a wood-fired earth oven. Small-scale direct sales of eggs and meat animals. The gradual establishment of a you-pick berry patch, bikeable distance from town.

This vision may or may not fit the next place we find ourselves, and we know we'll have to adapt. We'll have to re-establish ourselves, and have to be creative. We know we'll need to find a way to connect the people to their food and the land that supports it. And, most basic, we'll have to build up soil, again, somewhere now.

Before joining that friend in her tipi this evening, we'd spent most of the day searching for a place. We toured properties in the region with a realtor who gradually began to understand that no matter how cold it was, we were going to get out, walk the field, and kick up soil, rub it carefully between our fingers, examine the vegetation, take a deep breath of cold air, and search for anything that will help anchor us in this hard, wide open search.

"Don't worry!" Noah is a farmer. Noah taking a break to work in the tea gardens of Yunnan Province, China.

I remember a trip to Yunnan Province, China, when I took some time to work, to really dig in, alongside local farmers. It had been a good day of walking and doing farm assessments in the tea lands, and I took a break from the certification work to clear weeds with some of the farmers. We stood on a steep hillside, tilling with a large steel hoe. I noted that both the steel and the wood handle of the tool were fabricated in the nearby village. The people working beside me are a group of hired laborers. They all have gardens for their own food and for small market crops. Like me, they are farmers at home who are hired for outside work as well.

As we weed, I throw my body into the work just as I do in Montana or anywhere, and my translator is busy gesticulating and hurriedly explaining that I know how to do this, that I'm like them: a farmer. They get it, after the inital surprise, and for a short time we fall into a working routine. It feels good, and days like this, farming feels right, natural and I feel like I belong. It's not always that clear.

When we tell our friends and family that we are farmers, we sometimes get puzzled reactions. On a good day, we tell them that this is the best decision we've made. Building soil and growing food and community feels like the best thing we can be doing. The other days are more complicated. There are a lot of reasons small farms everywhere - not just here in the US - are in danger. As we continue to work toward making farming a larger part of our livelihood, we're thinking carefully about what, exactly, is needed--not just by us, but by farmers in general. Here's our current list:

Mary separates onion starts and prepares to plant in one of our raised beds.

1. Access to land. Although not all farmers own the property they farm, the bottom line is that you can't grow food without soil. If that soil is not owned by the farmer, the acess to the land needs to be clear and secured for long enough that investments of time, energy and inputs can take shape and pay off over time. In our own land search, we've found that it gets even more complicated when you want to live on that land. It's not too hard to rent a field or pasture somewhere, and in theory a farmer can commute to their crops. But for us, being close to it all to tend animals a few times a day and generally keep an eye on things seems the only logical way to farm. That land also needs some water - in our warming climate, getting water to our crops is more important than ever.

2. Mentors. Farming is a continual learning process, and farmers need good mentors--people we can call on for advice on how to put up a fence, whether to harvest or cover when a frost is coming, how to build a router table or treat an ailing animal. It can take a lot of mentors, with different areas of expertise.

3. Infrastructure. A farm is more than bare soil. Though the level of infrastructure varies with the style and scale of farming, there are needs: for shelters, fences, irrigation equipment, animal transport, tillage and harvesting equipment, and ways to gather organic inputs and transport animals. As we learn to build more and more of our own equipment, we find we find we need more space for the tools and projects to take shape.

4. Community. A farm can't persist, or at least can't provide a livelihood, without the help of other people. That community includes neighbors, supporters, and friends; for us, bringing people onto to the farm to gather in community is an important part of the process. Some are nearby, like the neighbors who stop by to drop off a sample of their favorite beans and a promise to save some good seeds if we like them too. Others read, advise, or support us from afar. And the community, of course, includes markets: in order to make a living, even part of a living, at this, we need people who are willing to pay for what the farm produces.

5. Raw guts. In order to find the right blend of the above, it takes a lot of courage. Whether it's building your own garden carts, chicken coops, and fences, or reaching out for help and neighboring, putting the ingredients together for a sucessfull farm takes a lot of work.

Our main garden and gate, before opening and working in the morning.

It's a difficult game; being a farmer these days takes a lot of balance. My friend Ron Goddard, a cowboy who has traveled all over the American West, first cowboying and now being a mentor to beginning ranchers, says that 'Farmers and ranchers need to make as much as someone in Silicon Valley. They need to be able to afford health insurance and afford to travel.' We are learning, bit by bit, what it might take to do that, knowing we need so many peices, but hopeful that we can fit them together. Not to make as much as someone in Silicon Valley, but at least to support ourselves and contribute to our community.

You might say that I found a secret life, back in one of the deepest hidden places in the interior of Borneo. I spent a lot of my days there walking forest trails, gathering forest foods and searching, with experts, for wild meat in the tropical forests. We would start late in the day, sometimes even in the night, and often we'd go all night on charged AA batteries. We'd walk the rivers, past the forest farm plots where we spent our other time, stuffing our backpacks with roots, shrimp, fruits, and fish. I fell into a rhythm, and the weeks turned easily into months. The time for planting rice came, and though I knew I'd gained friendship, trust, and knowledge from my late night excursions, it was digging into the steep mountain slopes that changed my life. For weeks, I woke each morning in elevated tropical timber houses carved out of the very forest edge where we were farming. After coffee and rice we'd start our day by planting one of 17 different rice varieties that the community I was living with saved and planted each year. We used so many types in order to hedge against drought, pest, disease, storms, or too much rain. We all planted these different varieties, every family in the village, on different slopes with different soils. I stayed for the planting season, and the planting became a way of living. We'd plant family to family, along a vast forest edge in food gardens that were connected to each other. I'd sleep in different houses, depending on what land parcel we finished working on each day. One night, after glasses of rice wine, we all got to talking about someone who could taste soil. Of course, any of us can take a taste of soil; we all end up with earth in our mouths, sometimes. But the story, the magic, was that this individual could discern the type of soil by that taste--what it held, what it could support, even what it might be missing in order to grow the best rice or other foods.

Durian Fruit Tree, famous for its seeds. Photo by Noah.

I couldn't get this out of my mind, the story of the soil taster, as I worked and planted in the days that followed. So a guide and I set out searching. We looked for days, camping along forest trails, abandoned camps, in old mango and durian fruit groves where communities once lived. We never found him. Or, to be truthful, we found one of his relatives, much later, who didn't quite believe the story.

While I've heard that there are still people who can taste and know soil, the fact that this knowledge and possibility was lost there with this one individual bothered me. Weeks later, with the planting season finished, I hiked out - a long day hike to a logging road on my own. I didn't need a guide anymore, I could speak some of the local dialect, some bahasa, and I trusted the hand drawn map of river intersections, hunting trails, and landmarks - beehives, ironwood and beetlenut trees.

Still based in Asia after this experience, I secretly drifted. I traveled everywhere, living and farming with communities. I was paid as a consultant to travel even further and work with more distant farmers in East and West Africa. I had a growing fear that farming was eroding just as I was capturing it, across all these continents. Whether it was along the vanilla trail in Madagascar, or the highlands of Papua New Guinea, I had a hunch that something was wrong. In one assignment, I was a mediator in an effort to document high value lands for an Asian government. One evening, a villager and friend tired of my questions, tired of the effort to mark some spaces more important than others, 'it's all valuable. We need all this space to grow our food, to live, to nurture.'

A forest landscape image made from a logging road in the interior of Borneo. Fruit trees that shelter community gardens are revealed as a rain storm passes. Image by Noah.

At the height of that consultant career, I bought a satelite phone to transmit some of these stories of farm and forest community struggle to a wider audience. Along the lines of transmission, though, or by the strike of a delete key in the United States, my worries about farmers losing land, losing knowledge, and not having support were often lost or diluted.

Back in Malaysia, where I lived, I dove in deeper, working on permaculture farms. I started traveling with small teams of farmers to document land conversion, injustice, power relations, and banned chemicals.

On one difficult assignment, where I had carried my video camera for miles without getting any good footage, I sat down out of frustration. I had a long hard look that day at where I was, where my own roots might be. My friend's own food garden back in the United States needed tending. I had started a long distance relationship with a woman who loved digging in and growing too. I didn't know yet if she tasted soil, but I had seen her smell it, breathing in Oregon coastal forest loam in a familiar way.

So, I knew I had to farm, myself. I wanted to be with people, to grow community, actively, putting the camera down, doing the work. I knew that I might never have any land that I owned outright, but I craved land where I could sink roots, stay, and by caring for it, feel that mutual support. Now that we might have to leave the land we had been growing on, after a year of growing all of our own food, and much much more, Mary and I are in deep. We know just how those farmers feel when there is a storm in the night, when our sheep are threatened, or when another parcel nearby, that could be someone's farmland, is sold off or built on.

There comes a time in every story teller's life when there is nothing left to do but to act: to synthesize what knowledge can be found, and, as one farmer put it at a workshop here 'you just have to start.'

We don't know where this journey will take us, and this writing, but it is our attempt to dig in, to find our own tribe, to be a part of planting and preserving the rich diversity of foods: to find 17 varieties of something. To become the people who we chase, in stories and in our daily work, building our own soil, growing roots, ourselves and one another.

If you think of farming as some sort of dance with the elements, this time of year is the tense and highly-charged Latin pas-de-deux between grower and the nightly low. The weather entered our corner of river bench this week with a new, more serious rhythm, and tapped our unsuspecting shoulders with the first notes of frost. There is no choice but to join that dance, listening to that sky, that wind, that rising breath of air up from the river. We make careful circling steps now, especially as night falls and we try to match every move of this new dancer. Every inch of skin feels the touch of this weather partner that can turn crazy at any moment this time of year. Last night we met it close in, face to face, felt the breath of cold and unfurled folds of remay. The white row-cover cloth billowed under the full harvest moon: a flourish and twirl to wrap basil, pepper, eggplant, against that frosty pass. We left the garden under that cold moon, uncertain what how close that frost might come.

It made its own flourish while we slept, and morning, though sunny, showed the moves: black tips of basil, lower stems left green; topmost squash leaves with a new dry rustle. It was a light pass, just a quick kiss of frost, not the big one yet. But the dance has started, and we lock eyes on the weather, feeling that exchange, the push-pull of sun, cold, cover, and harvest; seeking the last hours of growing when it all counts so much. Summer ends in just two days, and it only gets more dramatic from here on out.

It’s wildfire season in Montana. This plume was from an evening when the fire made a huge jump in size, and had us wondering if it might even come over to this side of Blue Mountain.

It was a simple enough phrase, the short, shocking sort of call that can wrench a farmer out of bed at any hour: "Noah, the sheep are gone!" It was about the last news Mary wanted to bring from an early morning round of chores with a big day of garden-harvest planned. But this task needed both of us, and Noah was up and ready in a heartbeat at those words. The dangers of farming vary by region, of course, but wherever they are based, nothing rips farmers out of a deep sleep quite like the knowledge that some portion of the year's food or income is gone or in danger.

For our friends in the coffee lands of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, it can be torrential rains that bring the fear of landslides. For ranchers in Eastern Montana, it might be the threat of late spring hail and snow in calving season. We are gradually learning the challenges of our space here between Western Montana hills.

That morning was not the first time our sheep had escaped. After one June thunderstorm, they'd shown up in a neighbor's pasture just down the road. That morning, even before 6 am, several neighbors rallied together to gather our herd. But this day was different. The Lolo Complex fires had doubled in size the night before, fueled by dramatic winds, and the the whole valley had that smokey ominous light. We knew that when we closed our garden gate late the night before we had scared a herd of deer that thundered out of the pasture. If that was what had taken down some of the electric fence, it was possible the sheep had been loose for almost eight hours already. We had no idea where or how far they might have gone.

After a hopeful first check of the property, we had to expand the search, and cruised the neighborhood in the farm truck, peering into pastures, knocking on doors, ducking through fences and behind barns of people we barely know, some we still haven't met. It's not the best way to meet your neighbors, wide eyed and tense, with an opening line of "our sheep are missing; they escaped in the storms last night."

So, we scoured river bottoms, crashed through brushy thickets and back pastures, crossing surprising little streams and holding barbed wire strands apart for each other. We began to form a whole new mental map of our rural neighborhood, surprising connections and secret-feeling passages. But the growing worry and frustration overshadowed any sense of excitement of discovery. We couldn't help but think of the stories from Ivan Doig's latest book The Bartenders Tale, which had helped us through some a winter drive this past year. The sheepherder Canada Dan is one of those rough western holdouts: independent, tough and weathered, a little outside of normal society. One day, also after big storms, he drags himself back to the Medicine Lodge bar, the center of the town, swearing never to go back to that work again after losing a whole herd of sheep in a surprise lightening storm. Growing grim and tense ourselves, we exchanged looks, admitting that there was a chance these sheep, our flock of five, was flat-out gone. We could feel a new kinship with Canada Dan, worn down and ready to be done with it all, wondering what it would be like to be one of these neighbors who were just sitting on a porch enjoying leisurely weekend morning coffee. We wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into. It’s hard not to think about how all the hours of work with these animals could end up being for nothing if we couldn’t find them.

The coyotes who inhabit the nearby butte warned us and the dogs away from their particular rocky knoll on a morning hike this July. We are very wary that our sheep pasture less than one mile away from one of the dens.

And yet, at the same time, we could be grateful that these sheep were not our complete and only income--grateful that we started small, and hadn't bet everything on the sale of a flock. Because it seemed more than likely that these sheep had headed far out. We're starting to think of ourselves as farmers now, at least in a small way, subsistence farming with the goal of eating the whole year almost exclusively what we have grown here; it's exciting and satisfying. But those moments of lost sheep can feel frighteningly powerless...what does one do with five sheep missing completely? We even considered calling in to the public radio station, like one might for a lost dog. In the end, we just kept searching. It was all we could do.

Back when we started working together in Forest Grove, we thought we were really getting into it with our eight hens, one bag of coffee, pilot coffee course, and coffee CSA. And we were learning, digging in, starting our roots and even our homesteading in that triple city lot. Some of you who have been with us since the start remember that first roast, the Chicken Chaser, named for those first forays into our home-growing and our coffee and farmer partnerships.

We are in so much deeper now. Back then the chickens, the handful of raised beds, the greens in the garden window, the coffee, the student programs were additions, sidelines to other work and more-standard jobs. Now it's a quarter acre garden, 21 hens, and the small herd of lambs intended to supply the year's meat for us and a neighboring family. Not only that, it's a growing coffee CSA in Missoula, steadily increasing list of mail supporters, coffee picked up by pallet instead of individual bag, and an all-out effort to launch a student course. We have let go of the stability of our old jobs, and the farming and the Forest Voices work has become our attempts at livelihood, so the stakes are so much higher now.

Mary prepares to open our improptu sheep trailer after we've moved them over to a pasture we share with neighbors.

When the sheep are out or the corn blows down, we feel those higher stakes now in a way that we didn't before. And yet, we still have backups, still have some security. Even if those sheep were never found, we'd have lost investments and time, but we wouldn't go bankrupt, though we'd be eating less meat. If coyotes or raccoons found the chicken coop, we wouldn't go hungry. We'd just have to make fewer omelets.

Many of our farming friends and partners, in contrast, are all in and feel even more acutely those passing storms, rolling fires, and threats to the thin margin between making it and not. Storms in Indonesia are increasing, and while Eko and his team in Java work hard to protect microclimate and reforest degraded slopes, the coffee harvest comes with increasingly unpredictable timing. Many farmers in Vietnam have to rely on a system of corrupt water trucks that ply delivery routes in order to water their vegetables. And once they get the water to the nearest farm road, it still has to reach fruit trees and vegetables through pipe. Those farmers who live too far from good access, have to buy or use a water pump. These are the farmers that can do the math in their head, know how many of gallons of gas, how much time and labor a crop really takes. One thing we've gained in this sometimes tough year of planting and growing is a growing kinship with these farmers who, like us, are often small and often at the edge. Like us, they build stuff, break equipment and learn to fix it.

Our neighbor Sig, who raised hundreds of sheep in this neighborhood at a time when, as he puts it “a pair of Levi’s cost $4,” lends a hand as we load up the sheep in the improvised stock trailer made of straw bales and Noah’s old art-booth panels (below) to move them to new and more-secure pasture. He hasn’t lost any of his sheep-handling skills since those days, and showed us a few good tricks, like how the right hold makes even our biggest sheep easy to put where we want.

Sometimes we question this way, perhaps more often than we should. But there are times when it can be a series of blows--yet another shock from the solar-charged electric fence, another animal out, another repair or trip to the emergency room. We barter for what we can, and more and more, we buy the raw materials, the steel, wood, tools, seeds and animals instead of buying something ready-made. It's all a way to build the soil and skills that, on our best days, make for a hand-crafted life.

We found those sheep again, in the end, not far from home. Just as we had decided things were pretty dire and were returning home for some food and water before launching a several-hour scouring of the neighboring butte and low-lying areas along the river, the second sheep-news exclamation of the day changed our course of action again "Noah, look! The sheep!" Two of them had wandered out of the head-high thicket of thistle across the road where, apparently, they had all passed the morning hunkered down and ignoring our searching and calling. By the time we returned they had wandered up to graze Mike's lawn and drink from the irrigation ditch. With a bit of advanced herding we had all five back into the home pasture within a half-hour.

Perhaps there are metaphors here for our new lives. As we dig deeper in, it's up to us, all of us, to neighbor better, to make those connections we always believed we could have. Sometimes this connection is just lending a hand, helping round up sheep, or discussing a new idea over coffee or a meal. Yet other times, it's the wrangling of some sort of peace, doing deep thinking and acting with ourselves, our land, and neighbors.

We call this member of our flock "The President," affectionately termed because the way this ram leads our entire flock and comes running to us.

A boy in interior Borneo searches for forest tubers to harvest and save before the rainy season.

Oil Palm Extraction

A farmer in a small hamlet processes oil palm late one afternoon in her small family parcel of cocoa, coffee, and fruit.

Maize Store

Elsewhere in West Africa, maize dries in an elevated communal storehouse for months to come.

Hunting Camp, Borneo

An indigenous Penan family processes a wild pig, saving meat, fat, and the entire animal. Meat is smoked and fermented for long term storage.

Garden Harvest, North America

In an old home-kitchen, Noah and Mary harvest freshly harvested garden produce, blanching, freezing and canning.

In our kitchen this evening, as with nearly every evening this time of year (and some afternoons), there is the steady sound of boiling water, glass jars clanging about, and sometimes, just the sound of the freezer door opening and closing. Despite our modern methods, it's an ancient ritual, this collecting and putting away food for the winter: for seasonal feasts, for sharing, and simply to have enough to feed ourselves.

In kitchens all across the United States now, and all over the world, there is a small tribe of us that works with the rhythm of the seasons. Farmers in Asia and Africa sometimes gasp or cluck when I explain that we have a short growing season. Here in Missoula, we average around 120 growing days, so we are always pushing back those margins: starting seeds inside when snow is still on the ground, or planting under a protective fabric row cover.

But when I explain that the rhythm is the same, that most of the food we eat has a cycle, much like maize in Africa, or wheat in China, with the best time to plant, and the best time to harvest, and then preserve or store, farmer's heads nod. In Borneo, I stayed with an indigenous community for some weeks planting 17 varieties of rice. The forest-based community subsisted on rotated parcels of rice, wild fruit gardens, and food - both wild edibles and game - collected from the forest. But, for weeks, we only stopped working in the evenings because all the rice needed to be planted. There, as here, there are distinct times to gather honey, to follow migrating wild pigs, certain fish that are best harvested by the light of the moon.

And so it is the same way here. We exhaust ourselves this time of the year because the harvest is plentiful but so short: 40 pounds of tomatoes yesterday, 18 pounds of vegetables today, all that need a home in a freezer, or glass jar - either canned or fermented.

This time of year, it's easy to start too late, to stay up in the evening. I think of my friends in The Ivory Coast that process palm oil on their small farms, rendering it into the evening. I think of a nomadic family I stayed with, one night when they processed their own cooking oil from a fresh pig - everything needed to be saved.

So, when we pull seeds out of one of our Black Krim heirloom tomatoes, one that didn't split in the rains of the past days. I think, this one, we'll save. This tomato weathered a whole season of growing, including storms, winds, predators that passed through the garden. It didn't get eaten by animals and then it rippened. While I pull the seeds, coyotes howl. I go outside, in the moonlight, and I think I can hear geese, that flew overhead - on the way to warmer weather - roosting. Soon, before we know it, the harvest of this growing season will be over. So, with care, we pick out the seeds slowly, drying them on cotton towels or a cutting board, any corner of the kitchen where there is space. We lay the seeds down, breath, look up at the moon wild eyed and fulfilled, thankful that we share this ritual with a tribe of fellow growers, harvesters, seed savers and preservers.

One of our Black Krim heirloom tomatoes. Image made before fully ripened and seeds for saving were harvested. Photos by Noah Jackson

One of our two growing spaces, we call this 1/4 acre garden (13,000 square feet), the H-Brace.

It's strange, in a way, to start writing about this place and our work here just as we begin to understand how easily all of it could be lost. Maybe we should start with how we found the place, began building soil even in the cold of winter, how we put up fences in lightening storms, dug garden beds in soaking rains, shoveled manure in the snow. But the swift current of starting-up can leave little time for writing, and at some point we have to just start with where we stand. We'll return to those other parts later: swarm season and the night of thirty-thousand bees; hundreds of seedlings in the kitchen. Right now, the story starts with the tension, the knowledge that we could lose it all, take away from all this nothing but the first-year harvest and the stories. Where we stand, two river benches up from the channels of the Bitterroot River seems like a safe distance from dangerous waters. But, as we're starting to learn, floods aren't the only dangers to home and farmland.

This is a place we couldn't help but fall for: the long gravel drive lined with black walnut trees climbs a slight hill that is the highest of the ancient river terraces. Up there, what we think of as the second river-bench up, is the old orchard, surrounded by windbreaks of spruce, aspen, ponderosa, and wide basswood trees that have hummed all summer with bees. The barns and buildings hold a quiet history, some of which we've incorporated into our own home and life. We moved stacks of wood in the barn, some of which, after exposing the bright wood underlayers with the planer, we joined and built into our kitchen table. Behind the stacks we found the old milking stanchion, decades out of use but still showing wear-marks from the shuffling hooves and rubbing necks of generations of milk cows.

From the top-of-the-bench front pasture, which we have opened, turned, and grown into a lush garden, we can see down across a few fields to the cottonwood grove along the river where our friends got married this summer. Beyond the river, forested hills rise into wilder edge where we go sometimes to run.

You can't dig in this deep and not fall in love, not want to kneel down on this garden soil and pledge to the black earth some lasting bond--call cottonwood, elm, and walnut all to witness, a promise to stay and to nurture this place.

But as we stand now, though the river is running low behind the cottonwoods in its end of summer trickle, we feel the creeping rise of a different sort of flood: the simple but flint-hard realities of ownership, power, market-value of land that are stacked against us. All of the work and all of the future we'd hoped for on this spot could be swept away. There is a flood of anger and sadness inside of us: emotions that defies the 200-year floodplain and comes right up into the farm we are making home.

Yesterday, we sat at our barnboard table and talked with a neighbor about the real expense of land here. In our Target Range neighborhood, the three acre parcel we have begun to grow food on is valued at close to $300,000. To stay on our property, to remain working on our farm, we would have to be able to live here. When we agreed to this trial year arrangement to farm and grow food here, with the possibility of continuing long term, our good-faith agreement included the possiblity to build and live on the land. Our understanding, from the landowner, was that eventually we could build an additional permanent home on the property and that in the meantime, we could put up an alternative structure like a yurt without any need for formal permits. It turns out to be so much more complicated--we all should have dug deeper into the details, rather than trusting in word-of-mouth assurances.

This week, we spent hours on the phone with the county, talking about this next step that was central to our growing our farm. The shocking news was that this would mean subdividing the property, paying for permiting and land survey. It turns out that it's really expensive, nearly five times the investment of our entire first year farming operation, which has been close to $10,000. And that's just for the possibility to stay on the farm and build a home. We are grateful that the landowner we work with values the food-growing potential of this land so much that she is seeking ways to have us be able to stay without needing to purchase the land outright at that value--but we also have to be mindful of the investment she made in her original purchase.

That same neighbor pointed out to us that if we wanted to make our whole living solely from farming, we'd be better off 20 or 30 or 100 miles away, where we could by much more land for much less.

In our area, there is a lot of talk about preserving farmland and the space to grow food. There should be: by 2050 there will be 9 billion people on this planet, all needing to be fed. Much of the food consumed in Missoula comes from outside Western Montana despite the region's agricultural history and capacity to grow food. But it's access to land that's the tricky bit to figure out, for people wanting to grow and supply more. Even though farm land is actively being preserved by organizations we support (CFAC, for example), much of that preservation does not include a pathway to land access or security for small farmers.

In realizing we could lose all of this land, and not be able to afford new land or another option that gives us security, we have learned the following:

What is the value of land? How do we value food produced, farm events, neighbors bringing gifts of vegetables, seeds, stories?

What shall be done with the two feet of topsoil we dug through when we put in the garden posts? All over this valley, that topsoil is paved over, turned to nothing more than lawns and driveways, every day. What's left open is often nothing more than horse pasture. Here's our chance to impact the security of the regional food supply, the chance to step up and show that we do value sustainability, and the ability of this region, this town, this valley to feed itself. But what can do about it? How do we keep this land in food production?

Our Target Range neighborhood, zoned as the special low density rural district, doesn't seem so rural from this aerial image.

It's an old equation, turning land into money. Those of us with neither can end up just stuck, just waiting, or unable to live this dream of farming. And yet, we are the ones who are willing, who are able, to make that land into something else--not money, but food. Food that nourishes us all daily, the food that tumbles from plant to harvest basket to plate--seemingly like magic. But not just magic--it's the nights in early spring when we shoveled manure onto the beds under the light of the moon, sand the clouds dropping dregs of snow. The magic started with hours of shoveling beds, to deepen the topsoil by just a few more inches. This allows more space for growing roots, making that landing of seeds to earth and the transition of growing, living, and dreaming, just a little softer and more welcoming.

November 5, 2013 Update: After a lot of thinking and decision about our land, we wanted to post an update for all of you that have followed and written comments of support. Here's the latest about our loss of farmland, and what's in store for the future.

Written by Mary Bricker and Noah Jackson

On a good day near the end of our short growing season in September, we are finding that it's easy to harvest more than 60 pounds of produce from our growing space. It's time to start harvesting in earnest and store our food for the winter.

Why we write. On our home farm, we see connections between what we do and the farmers and people we work with around the world. We share these adventures here to invite you into the learning and community, regardless of where you are located.